Act II, Scene 2: Smoke-Filled Research
"...leaders of the drive to prohibit smoking in public
frequently resort to scare tactics to make nonsmokers believe their health
is being harmed by tobacco smoke in the atmosphere."
A 1979 white paper on "Public
Smoking" (1188.04, p.2) offering strategy tips for B&W employees on the "controversy"
over the health effects of second-hand smoke.
The research machine that B&W and BAT had created clanked on, even though
the more the companies learned, the worse their legal position became. For
instance, twenty years ago, almost no one was thinking about sidestream
smoke, which comes from the burning end of the cigarette and is now known
to cause lung cancer in non-smokers who breathe it. Yet in 1976, B&W
ran two projects on it (list
of science projects, 1005.01 p. 14, et seq.). The firm's scientists
recognized that sidestream was more irritating than mainstream smoke - the
smoke inhaled by drawing on the cigarette - and looked for ways to cut down
on it. Times changed. At federal hearings a few years ago, the industry
was embarrassed when it was pointed out that the academic institutions it
had hired to document the harmlessness of second-hand smoke had no-smoking
policies in their campus buildings.
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